A variety of web-based applications provide users with the ability to collaboratively generate content, for example, by creating and/or editing web page components, or even entire web pages, via a conventional web browser application. Some web-based applications that provide such functionality are referred to as wikis. One particular type of application that provides such functionality is a web-based encyclopedia that allows users to generate and edit articles on various topics of interest. Another example of an application that relies on collaborative, user-generated content is a question-and-answer application that provides an online forum that enables users to post questions, post answers to questions, or simply view questions and corresponding answers.
With this type of application, because the content is user-generated and often several users may be contributing, it is often difficult to effectively and efficiently maintain the content in an organized manner. For instance, with a web-based encyclopedia application, multiple users may generate articles for similar, or even the same, topic. As the number of article entries grows, it can become an extremely daunting and time consuming task for a content administrator to manually identify what are essentially duplicate articles and then combine their content. Similarly, with a question-and-answer application, users may establish various topics or categories to which questions are assigned. When users create multiple topics for what is essentially the same subject matter, it may become difficult for users to quickly identify content of interest. For instance, if four or five synonymous topic names exist for the same subject matter, such as, “San Francisco Bay Area,” “The Bay Area,” “San Francisco, Calif.,” “San Francisco,” “The Greater Bay Area,” and so forth, it becomes difficult for a user to know which of the several topics to select to find relevant information. When different topic names are used for the same subject matter, it may be time consuming for a user to assign a particular question to all of the relevant topics. Moreover, as the number of topics associated with a particular questions increases, the time required to process the data and to identify and recall all of the topics associated with a particular question may also increase, thereby introducing a delay into the user experience.